After a task force of experts said evidence didn’t support some cancer screenings, it became the target of lawmakers, including HHS nominee Tom Price and others with health industry ties.propublica.org(See also Tom Price)

The Department of Health and Human Services inspector general launches an investigation into the Trump administration’s decision to pull ads encouraging people to sign up for the Affordable Care Act during the enrollment period.huffingtonpost.com(See also First 100 Days)

2017.03.25

Trump appoints a conservative think-tank staffer who has argued that gays being allowed to marry is a threat to religious liberty and that civil rights protections should not extend to transgenders to head the Civil Rights Office at the Department of Health and Human Services.huffingtonpost.com(See also First 100 Days, LGBTQIA)

Standing before 40,000 Boy Scouts, Trump bragged about the “record” crowd size, bashed President Barack Obama, criticized the “fake media," trashed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and threatened to fire his health and human services secretary if he couldn’t persuade members of Congress to vote for the Republican health-care bill.washingtonpost.com(See also Unpresidential Behavior, Tom Price)

2017.08.11

The Trump administration has abruptly cut short grant programs aimed at ending teen pregnancy, as an office within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notified 81 institutions across the U.S. that the five-year grants they were awarded would end two years sooner than planned.thehill.com(See also Women)

Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.nytimes.com(See also Assaults on Facts, Immigration)

2017.09.19

In a sharp departure from his predecessors, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price last week took private jets on five separate flights for official business, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars more than commercial travel.politico.com(See also Tom Price, Unprecedented Actions)

An HHS official said that Price would write a check for $51,887.31, which appears to cover the cost of his seat on chartered flights but not those of his staff. The total estimated cost of these trips exceeded $400,000.

2017.09.29

Tom Price resigned as Donald Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary, after days of public outcry over his use of private jets to conduct government business, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.nbcnews.com(See also Tom Price, Corruption)

Price's 261 days in office make him the shortest-ever serving Health and Human Services Secretary.

2017.10.06

The Trump administration issued a rule that sharply limits the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate, a move that could mean many American women would no longer have access to birth control free of charge.washingtonpost.com(See also Women, Health Care)

The new regulation, issued by the Health and Human Services Department, allows a much broader group of employers and insurers to exempt themselves from covering contraceptives such as birth control pills on religious or moral grounds.

2017.12.22

Almost 9 million people signed up for ACA coverage, slightly less than last year, but it had a shorter sign-up window, and its advertising budget was slashed by the Trump administration.axios.com(See also Affordable Care Act, Health Care)

2018.01.17

The Trump administration is considering a set of regulations that would offer new protections to health workers who refuse to provide care to transgender patients or women seeking abortion services.splinternews.com(See also Women, LGBTQIA, Homophobia)

2018.01.26

Covered California, the state's ACA insurance exchange, has published the first estimates of what "Trumpcare" will cost in 2019, as premiums will increase by 16% to 30%.latimes.com(See also Affordable Care Act, Health Care)

2018.01.31

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resigned on Wednesday, in the middle of the nation’s worst flu epidemic in nearly a decade, because of her troubling financial investments in tobacco and health care companies that posed potential conflicts of interest.nytimes.com(See also Resignations and Dismissals, Conflicts of Interest)

A political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, Ximena Barreto, shared an image in 2017 that said "our forefathers would have hung" Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for treason, while also calling Islam "a cult" and pushed the false Pizzagate conspiracy.cnn.com(See also Belief in Conspiracy Theories, Racism)

2018.04.19

A federal judge in D.C. ruled Thursday that the Trump administration's cuts to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, ending their five year grants in 2018 rather than in 2020, were unlawful.thehill.com(See also Legal Activity, Women, Reversals)

2018.04.26

A top official with the Department of Health and Human Services told members of Congress that the agency had lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children it placed with sponsors in the United States, raising concerns they could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.nytimes.com(See also Immigration, Unprecedented Actions)

Border agents and child welfare workers are running out of space to shelter children who have been separated from their parents at the U.S. border as part of the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy, as nearly 300 of the 550 children currently in custody at U.S. border stations had spent more than 72 hours there, the time limit for immigrants of any age to be held in the government's temporary facilities, half of which are younger than 12.nbcnews.com(See also Immigration, Department of Homeland Security)

2018.06.12

The Trump administration is looking to build tent cities at military posts around Texas to shelter 1,000 to 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children being held in detention.mcclatchydc.com(See also Immigration, Jeff Sessions)

More than 10,000 migrant children are being held at 100 HHS shelters, which are now 95% full.

Due to the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, children as young as 3 are being ordered into court for their own deportation proceedings by themselves.texastribune.org(See also Immigration, Legal Issues)

2018.07.02

The Department of Health and Human Services has stopped reporting how many kids have been separated from their parents.pbs.org(See also Immigration)

2018.07.05

Federal authorities have acknowledged for the first time Thursday that of the nearly 3,000 children who are still in federal custody, about 100 are under the age of 5, while the Department of Homeland Security confirms that records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed.nytimes.com(See also Immigration, Administration Errors, Department of Homeland Security)

2018.07.08

The Trump administration stunned world health officials, when it used trade sanctions and the withdrawal of military aid to try to block a measure that was considered uncontroversial and embraced by countries around the world concerning breastfeeding.nytimes.com(See also Women, Department of State)

2018.07.13

Tom Price, the former secretary of health and human services, repeatedly violated government travel rules and wasted at least $341,000 by billing taxpayers for his use of chartered jets and military aircraft.nytimes.com(See also Tom Price, Corruption)

The government should try to recoup the money improperly spent on 20 trips to such places as Florida and Switzerland, the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department said.

The Trump administration announced a new rule that would allow immigrant children with their parents to be held in detention indefinitely, upending a ban on indefinite detention that has been in place for 20 years.nbcnews.com(See also Reversals, Immigration)

2018.09.11

FEMA approved just 3% of applications for funeral assistance from more than 2,000 Puerto Rican families who lost loved ones after Hurricane Maria.buzzfeednews.com(See also Administration Errors)

Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer, reaching a total of 12,800 this month, compared to 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017.nytimes.com(See also Immigration)

The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors.

2018.09.18

The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of a new set of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters.nytimes.com(See also Immigration, Administration Errors)

The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.

2018.09.19

The Department of Health and Human Services is diverting millions of dollars in funding from a number of programs, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, to pay for housing for the growing population of detained immigrant children.yahoo.com(See also Immigration)

2018.09.30

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night and loaded onto buses to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.nytimes.com(See also Immigration, Department of Homeland Security)

Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases. But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government-wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.nytimes.com(See also LGBTQIA, Reversals, Assaults on Civil Liberties, Homophobia)

2018.10.26

Three months after a court-ordered deadline for US officials to reunify families separated at the southern border, the government revealed that it had identified more separated kids not included in previous tallies.buzzfeednews.com(See also Immigration, Administration Errors)

Officials now say there are 47 children still in federal custody who are potentially eligible to be reunified with a parent.

2018.11.26

The Trump administration is reducing the number of prescription drugs that must be made available to people with cancer, AIDS, depression, schizophrenia and certain other conditions through Medicare.nytimes.com(See also Health Care, Reversals)

2018.11.27

The Trump administration has put the safety of thousands of teens at a migrant detention camp at risk by waiving FBI fingerprint checks for their caregivers and short-staffing mental health workers, according to an Associated Press investigation and a new federal watchdog report.apnews.com(See also Immigration, Administration Errors)

None of the 2,100 staffers at a tent city holding more than 2,300 teens in the remote Texas desert are going through rigorous FBI fingerprint background checks, according to a Health and Human Services inspector general memo.

2018.11.29

The Trump administration announced new rules further dismantling the Affordable Care Act, by granting states broad freedom to help pay for unregulated health insurance plans, which typically have cheaper premiums but higher out-of-pocket costs and cover fewer services.buzzfeednews.com(See also Affordable Care Act, Reversals)